Online report of the Progressive Review. For 53 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

December 28, 2015

Brain drain: the hazards of grad school politics

Sam
Smith, 2009

Back when JFK was getting ready to invade Cuba, the New Republic got wind of
the CIA's training of Cuban exiles.

Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger was shown an advance copy of the article,
which he promptly passed to Kennedy, who in turn asked (successfully) that TNR
not print it. The New York Times also withheld a story on the pending invasion,
which Schlesinger would later praise as a "patriotic act" although he
admitted wondering whether if the "press had behaved irresponsibly, it
would not have spared the country a disaster."

Schlesinger was a prototype for that modern phenomenon, the meddlesome Harvard
prof seeking manly vigor by helping presidents damage this country. Henry
Kissinger and McGeorge Bundy would soon follow. Later, the staff and management
of the Harvard Business School would assist at the collapse of the Russian
economy even as their colleagues at the Kennedy School were teaching scores of
American politicians how to repeal 60 years of social progress.

It certainly hasn't all been Harvard's fault. As LBJ once told an aide, the CIA
was filled with boys from Princeton and Yale whose daddies wouldn't let them
into the brokerage firm.

The American intelligentsia has repeatedly let the country down. Consider that exemplar
for generations of law school students: Oliver Wendell Holmes. Prospective
litigants have all learned Holmes' immortal warning that "the most
stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting
fire in a theatre and causing a panic." Fewer, I suspect, have also
learned that these words were uttered in defense of the contemptible Espionage
Act and that Holmes himself was among those upholding Eugene Debs' sentence of
ten years in prison for saying such things as "the master class has always
declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles."

As early as the turn of the last century, Julian Benda noted, there had been a
shift among intellectuals from being a "check on the realism of the people
to acting as stimulators of political passions." He described these new
intellectuals as being most interested in the possession of concrete advantages
and material values, while holding up to scorn the pursuit of the spiritual,
the non-practical or the disinterested.

It is true that many intellectuals and grad school graduates took a strong
stand against the Vietnam War. But that was a long time ago and today there is
nothing even remotely close to that era including, in 1970, 1000 lawyers
joining an anti-war protest.

In The Twentieth Century: A People's
History, Howard Zinn describes a response by some of the intelligentsia
stunningly at odds with what we are currently observing: The poet Robert
Lowell, invited to a White House function, refused to come. Arthur Miller, also
invited, sent a telegram to the White House: "When the guns boom, the arts
die." Singer Eartha Kitt was invited to a luncheon on the White House lawn
and shocked all those present by speaking out, in the presence of the
President's wife, against the war. . . In Hollywood, local artists erected a
60-foot Tower of Protest on Sunset Boulevard. At the National Book Award
ceremonies in New York, fifty authors and publishers walked out on a speech by
Vice President.

These, remember, were protests against a far more liberal president than we
have today - a man who had already shepherded through Congress the most
progressive social changes since the New Deal.

Things really started to collapse with the Democratic conservative Clinton
administration, typified by a major group of intelligentsia coming to his
defense over the Monica Lewinsky affair. It's just lucky we didn't have to rely
upon this craven crowd when we were fighting George Wallace, Strom Thurmond,
Carmine DeSapio and Richard Daley. They probably would have lectured us all
about party unity.

You had Toni Morrison claiming that "the president is being stolen from
us" and Jane Smiley virtually applauding the president for demonstrating
in his relationship with Monica a "desire to make a connection with
another person something I trust." And there was even a multinational
manifesto issued by the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Desmond Tutu, William
Styron, Lauren Becall, Jacques Derrida, Sophia Loren, Carlos Fuentes, Vanessa
Redgrave and the ever-faithful Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Obama's campaign brought this crowd alive again and, as with Clinton, one hears
little talk of economic or social issues. It is all about the new savior. Who
needed to worry about foreclosures as long as Obama was in charge.

But beyond the weaknesses of the Democratic Party being turned into an elite,
conservative club are some serious intellectual problems. A growing number of
those in charge have been educated in graduate schools that train their
students in a particular and limited perspective on life: whether it be law,
business or economics. The number those trained in history, arts, anthropology
or the classics who have also risen to the politics top is miniscule.

The favored skills have their virtue but only within a larger context,
something recognized by twenty percent of the Harvard Business School graduates
who have signed a pledge "to serve the greater good," a move
presumably driven by a sense that the goal was not intrinsic to the school's
curriculum.

These schools are an elite form of vocational training. Vocational training is
useful when applied to the vocation for which one is trained. They can be
helpful in other fields as well, like running a government, but only in
conjunction with other values and skills.

Apply the law excessively and you can come up with endless good sounding
excuses for violating the Constitution.

Apply the lessons of business school excessively and you happily bail out many
of the biggest banks but hardly any homeowners in the depths of foreclosure
purgatory.

Apply the lessons of economics excessively and you can declare the recession
ending even as more Americans are losing their jobs.

Among the other biases is an undue faith in expertise and status, reflected in
the hierarchal approach to the stimulus bill and so-called education reforms.
There is little indication emanating from the Obama administration that it
appreciates or respects the vast pool of competent politicians and bureaucrats
at every level of our society. There is even an implicit disrespect reflected
in how much control is concentrated at such a high altitude. Among the effects:
a constituency of state and local officials who are somewhat or quite annoyed
at Obama instead of being enthusiastic participants in his programs.

You also can drive the soul out of politics, which helps to explain why we can
have such a huge recovery program with hardly any good stories of how it has
helped real people. In grad school politics, anecdotes don't count; only data.

As this soulless, heartless politics takes control, the distance between the
politician and the voter grows, even - as is now becoming painfully evident -
to the point of nasty distrust and anger.

Some of this, in the case of Obama, is due to ethnic prejudice and some to the
manipulation of issues like healthcare by the rotten right. But it is still
surprising that Obama of all people – who has yet to find an issue about which
he is reliably passionate and who uses the word 'bipartisan' like teenagers use
'you know' - has stirred such frenzy.

Among the factors at work may be that his very lack of conviction makes
convincing argument difficult; that at a time when so many are hurting so much,
he seems so distant and abstract; that he is able to present data but not draw
pictures, and that he lectures when he should just be talking and scolds when
he should be sharing.

Further, many of his well educated liberal constituents have made it quite
clear what they think about the mass of unhappy America. If you read the liberal
blogs and comments of their readers, what comes through is not a desire to
reach this constituency but merely to hold it in contempt. The numbers would
suggest that is not good politics.

Obama is not alone. Congress and the executive branch is increasingly filled
with those who know how to speak to a camera but not to an ordinary American.

Further, as our elites become better educated, more of what passes for learning
is vicarious, e.g. learned from books rather than from experience. As Robert
Louis Stevenson said, books are all right in their way but they are a pretty
poor substitute for life.

In earlier times the learned either had to retreat to monasteries or else have
their abstract knowledge constantly jostled by the daily demands of survival as
well as by the philistinism and practical knowledge of the non-literate masses.
Consider how different the daily life of a Jefferson or a Frederick Douglass
was in comparison with that of a Larry Summers or Henry Louis Gates. In earlier
times the privilege of the insular world belonged to a few monks and scholars;
today it is just another commodity one can purchase.

Among the most dramatic changes in Washington has been the disappearance of the
practical person, the individuals - whether pol, hack or advisor - who
compensate for deficiencies in formal learning with a superb understanding of
life. They were either masters of the pragmatic or of the moral, but in either
case served as the GPS of national politics.

In their place we find a town overflowing with decadent dandies who, to quote a
19th journalist, have been educated well beyond their intellects.

They keep busy creating fictions about the nature of politics and the
presidency that coincidentally serve their own ambitions, until they become
incapable of returning to reality.

The intelligentsia, like everything else in America, has also become
corporatized. This can be seen at its worst on campuses and in publishing
houses. Journalism and academia have become so subordinated to the needs of
their controlling conglomerates that the vital ground between starvation and
surrender has become, economically at least, increasingly difficult to hold.

The safest route is to cling to approved symbols while shucking substance, to
serve in a House of Lords of the mind, robed and bewigged but naked of power
and meaning.

This alteration in the relation of the intellectual to the culture was
instinctively grasped by the DC elementary school student as she defined the
difference between art and graffiti as "Art is when you have permission to
do it." These are days when you not only need permission for art, but also
to think. And among the places you go for permission are corporations and grad
schools.

For much of my life I have hewed to H. L. Mencken's dictum that the liberation
of the human mind has been best furthered by those "who heaved dead cats
into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world,
proving . . . that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary
was a fraud." For much of my life this strategy has worked. Even in the
gathering gloom of the Reagan-Bush years. But starting with the arrival of the
Clinton administration and its cultural as well as political authoritarianism,
skepticism began being blacklisted. Not only was belief to be unopposed by
doubt but the terms themselves were banned. In their place was only loyalty or
disloyalty.

Under current rules, truth belongs to the one with the most microphones clamped
to his podium and the most bucks to buy them. In the end it has become a
struggle for the control of fact and memory not unlike that described in 1984:
"Who controls the past controls the future, ran the Party slogan,
"who controls the present controls the past."

All that is needed is an unending series of victories over memory.

In such a time those with wrong memories and wrong facts are considered mad,
disparaged, and dropped from the cellphone. To hold power happily, one must not
be curious and one must not question fully accredited paradigms. To think is to
fail. . . .

America has frequently been blessed by the bitter dissatisfaction of those
still barred from tasting the fruits of its ideals. It has been the pressure of
the dispossessed, rather than the virtue of those in power, that has repeatedly
saved this country's soul.

In this century, three such influences have been those of immigrants, blacks,
and women. Yet in each case now, social and economic progress has inevitably
produced a dilution of passion for justice and change.

Thus we find ourselves with a women's movement much louder in its support of
Hillary Clinton than about the plight of its sisters at the bottom of the
economic pile. We have conservative black economists decrying the moral
debilitation of affirmative action but few rising to the defense of those
suffering under the rampant incarceration of young black males. We are also at
the end of an succession of Jewish writers and thinkers, raised on the
immigrant experience, who created much of the form of progressive 20th century
America. Now Jewish writers and thinkers tend to be too busy saving Israel to
even notice the American underclass.

Meanwhile, those truly at the bottom -- such as black and white men without a
college education or new immigrant groups -- are rarely heard from or about
except in reports on crime and poverty.

The dirty secret of 20th century social movements is that they have been
successful enough to create their own old boy and girl networks, powerful
enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough to ignore those
left behind.

Their elites have joined to form the largest, most prosperous, and most
narcissistic intelligentsia in our history.

And as the best and brightest enjoy their power, who will speak for those who,
in Bill Mauldin's phrase, remain fugitives from the law of averages? Not the
best and brightest because they have built an oligarchy that gets its face from
the united colors of Benetton but its economics from the divided classes of
Dickens.

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for over 40 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

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Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

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In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

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